It's not as bad as you think. I still remember reciting my 3 page essay on sharks in grade 7. Just try to memorize 5 lines, and repeat it over and over again until you can consistently say it without reading. Do the same for the next 5. Now go back to the first 5 and see if you can still say it. Then add on the succeeding 5 lines. Keep accumulating it until u get all 51 (obviously the last set of lines has to be a set of 6, or 5, then 1)

You ask if you are screwed, so I'm not going to lie. If by screwed you mean, forgetting 2-3 lines, yes you may be screwed. But, if you mean it as in forgetting large chunks, probably not. Just keep memorizing and rehearsing. Do it everyday.

Hold thy desperate hand:
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art:
Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast:
Unseemly woman in a seeming man!
Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!
Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order,
I thought thy disposition better temper'd.
Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself?
And stay thy lady too that lives in thee,
By doing damned hate upon thyself?
Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet
In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose.
Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit;
Which, like a usurer, abound'st in all,
And usest none in that true use indeed
Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit:
Thy noble shape is but a form of wax,
Digressing from the valour of a man;
Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury,
Killing that love which thou hast vow'd to cherish;
Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,
Misshapen in the conduct of them both,
Like powder in a skitless soldier's flask,
Is set afire by thine own ignorance,
And thou dismember'd with thine own defence.
What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew'st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten'd death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.
Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed,
Ascend her chamber, hence and comfort her:
But look thou stay not till the watch be set,
For then thou canst not pass to Mantua;
Where thou shalt live, till we can find a time
To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends,
Beg pardon of the prince, and call thee back
With twenty hundred thousand times more joy
Than thou went'st forth in lamentation.
Go before, nurse: commend me to thy lady;
And bid her hasten all the house to bed,
Which heavy sorrow makes them apt unto:
Romeo is coming.

Hold thy desperate hand:
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art:
Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast:
Unseemly woman in a seeming man!
Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!
Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order,
I thought thy disposition better temper'd.
Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself?
And stay thy lady too that lives in thee,
By doing damned hate upon thyself?
Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet
In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose.
Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit;
Which, like a usurer, abound'st in all,
And usest none in that true use indeed
Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit:
Thy noble shape is but a form of wax,
Digressing from the valour of a man;
Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury,
Killing that love which thou hast vow'd to cherish;
Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,
Misshapen in the conduct of them both,
Like powder in a skitless soldier's flask,
Is set afire by thine own ignorance,
And thou dismember'd with thine own defence.
What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew'st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten'd death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.
Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed,
Ascend her chamber, hence and comfort her:
But look thou stay not till the watch be set,
For then thou canst not pass to Mantua;
Where thou shalt live, till we can find a time
To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends,
Beg pardon of the prince, and call thee back
With twenty hundred thousand times more joy
Than thou went'st forth in lamentation.
Go before, nurse: commend me to thy lady;
And bid her hasten all the house to bed,
Which heavy sorrow makes them apt unto:
Romeo is coming.

Shakespeare is not so difficult to memorize. Perhaps I have a particularly powerful short term memory but just last year I memorized about 2 pages of Shakespeare's (excellent) play Julius Caesar - specifically Mark Antony's address to the forum - in the course of an odd hour in a single afternoon. Whether you are screwed or not entirely depends on your mental aptitude.

In regards to Okazaki Fragment's comment - I could easily cite studies that have proven that memory can be effectively "trained". For the last 4 years I've been having Latin declensions, conjugations, and constructions leaking from my ears, but now, however, I find myself a head up on my classmates when asked to store raw information. If you can garner all this prose into your head quickly enough, Headshotterer, I guarantee you will emerge a better man.

Shakespeare is not so difficult to memorize. Perhaps I have a particularly powerful short term memory but just last year I memorized about 2 pages of Shakespeare's (excellent) play Julius Caesar - specifically Mark Antony's address to the forum - in the course of an odd hour in a single afternoon. Whether you are screwed or not entirely depends on your mental aptitude.

In regards to Okazaki Fragment's comment - I could easily cite studies that have proven that memory can be effectively "trained". For the last 4 years I've been having Latin declensions, conjugations, and constructions leaking from my ears, but now, however, I find myself a head up on my classmates when asked to store raw information. If you can garner all this prose into your head quickly enough, Headshotterer, I guarantee you will emerge a better man.

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Making kids to memorize lines from Shakespeare is much easier than actually teaching something. There are a lot of things worth memorizing. Lines from Shakespeare isn't one of them.

We're falling so behind on real subjects like math and science that we have to import PhD students and college professors from abroad. Schools really shouldn't waste time "teaching" frivolous exact story line memorization. Teach the story if you must, but don't waste kids' time like this. And, no, reading Shakespeare, much less memorizing his words, does not make you a better person.

It is not that difficult, just cut the whining and get on with it. Professional actors memorize a hundred times that. It is a good exercise and it will make you a better person. To top it, you get yourself a great trick to dazzle chicks at parties.

It is not that difficult, just cut the whining and get on with it. Professional actors memorize a hundred times that. It is a good exercise and it will make you a better person. To top it, you get yourself a great trick to dazzle chicks at parties.

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Does not compute. How does learning to spout 50 lines of William's finest make you a better person?

Best overall method is to use as many senses as possible. Live the story in your mind. The secret is to live it in a familiar place, like the classroom you will perform it in. They will serve as memory cues. You still have to repeat this story in your mind to get it too stick, but much less than reciting text over an over. Test yourself everyday, and do one big test two days before the recital, just to make sure you aren't losing any of it.

Read, slowly a few times, then aloud, then right before you go to bed. This always helped me, as I would then dream about it and have it forever locked in my subconscious LOL Seriously though I can still recite things I memorized 15 years ago, but only if I don't think too hard on, and just let it flow.

It's a matter of naturally ordering the rhythm of the piece in your mind. Some things are easier to remember and recite than others, like Edgar Allen Poe poetry.

I think in many schools today they don't require enough memorization because its so easy to pull something up on the computer or use a calculator, etc. when memorization is a basic pattern inside the mind that helps silently in other aspects of life also. Can't say that it makes you a better person, but in general it can make you more organized and determined to accomplish what you need to without complaint.

I think in many schools today they don't require enough memorization because its so easy to pull something up on the computer or use a calculator, etc. when memorization is a basic pattern inside the mind that helps silently in other aspects of life also. Can't say that it makes you a better person, but in general it can make you more organized and determined to accomplish what you need to without complaint.

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^ In other words, it can help make one more obedient...
sigh...

Far too many people confuse mere memorization with actual learning.
Memorization often masquerades as education. But the two elements are very different.

Schools today exist for the most part merely to produce obedient, conforming citizens who fit nicely into 'society' and who question little or nothing.

Making kids to memorize lines from Shakespeare is much easier than actually teaching something. There are a lot of things worth memorizing. Lines from Shakespeare isn't one of them.

We're falling so behind on real subjects like math and science that we have to import PhD students and college professors from abroad. Schools really shouldn't waste time "teaching" frivolous exact story line memorization. Teach the story if you must, but don't waste kids' time like this. And, no, reading Shakespeare, much less memorizing his words, does not make you a better person.

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^ Best response thus far.

Generally, we remember best those things in which we have a genuine interest.
Things we are less interested in, we will find more difficult to memorize.

All that being said, an alternative to memorizing stuff that doesn't interest you is to write a decent essay on why mere memorization serves little purpose; how it is all too often confused with true learning, etc.
Or write an essay on a subject that you have a genuine interest in.
Of course, to do one of these things in lieu of the assigned memorization and get away with it, you'd need to have a fairly insightful and progressive teacher - an entity which is all too rare today.

#1 - Spend time actually volunteering in a school before you act like you know how and why things are assigned. Don't assume you know how things work if you aren't actually in the trenches.

#2 - Sometimes, memorization is a good thing, because sometimes, that is the only way to learn things. Your basic math facts...I bet you have those memorized.

#3 - To the OP, yes, this may seem like a waste of time to you, but as you memorize those lines, you are going to start understanding the deeper meaning of how those lines were put together. In a society that has reduced language to such things as 'how r u', 'lol', 'ttfn', this is a *good* thing. Words and language are not always just there to tell a story - they can have double meanings, irony, meter, rhythm, expression...and learning just a bit of a master such as Shakespeare will teach you all of these things and more. When you practice reciting, don't just blather back a bunch of words...find the meaning, understand *what* you are saying, and not only will it be easier to recite, you'll start to *get* it. Put yourself in the role of the speaker...really immerse yourself into this exercise, and not only will you do a good job and get a good grade, you might *learn* something! Good luck!

FWIW (<---haha, see the IRONY here), I also had to do such an exercise in HS, using Hamlet. I always thought Shakespeare was hard, because I always thought it was a challenge to pull everything apart and understand how it was put back together. And the words are so carefully crafted, you can't just gloss over part of it, or you'll miss something very important! Hamlet remains my favorite Shakespeare play to this day because it is the one I understand the most.

Memorization is an important skill. It makes your reactions faster. It can and it should be trained to a certain extent.

Sure, you can always look up facts. You can always find out that 7 times 7 is 49 if you make repetitive additions. You can always look up that S goes after R in the alphabet.You can always look up a foreign word in a dictionary. But if you know it by heart you can move on to more complex tasks without spending an insane amount of time.

The fact that education by memorization has been abused doesn't mean that it is a skill that should be outright dismissed.

You need to think in pictures. Most of the memory geniuses use visualization so that they are not relying on rote memory. Memorize the line, then associate it with an image that is easily recalled. The more outlandish the image, the easier it is to memorize.

As an example, "Like powder in a skitless soldier's flask, Is set afire by thine own ignorance,"

Now close your eyes and imagine a soldiers flask with powder in it that is colored like skittles candy, then you trip over the flask and it bursts into flames.

^^^Yep, pictures are the order of the day. I can't tell you what text was on some pages I have studied, but I can tell you the life cycle of malaria causing plasmodium exactly like the book diagram, and the yeast life cycle. Good enough.

I had to memorize and recite Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech this year and it's really not as hard as it looks. It's easier to memorize it if you know what the passage means and the longer you work on memorizing it, the more you will understand it. I would just memorize about 5 lines at a time by repeating them in my head and out loud. Then recite the entire soliloquoy and add the 5 lines you just learned on the end. Eventually, you will remember the entire thing pretty easily.

#1 - Spend time actually volunteering in a school before you act like you know how and why things are assigned. Don't assume you know how things work if you aren't actually in the trenches.

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I've done that, thanks.
Perhaps it's YOU who shouldn't be assuming things.
I've seen the education system first hand. I am far less than impressed with it. Progressive teachers face so many restrictions, it's insane.

One need only look at the products of the education system to see that it is quite obviously a system that is failing miserably. Hell - today, a huge number of University students (I would say most) don't even know how to spell at what was once considered a grade 7 level.
And the low standards keep lowering...

Again - school, as it exists today, is meant to produce obedient, conforming members of society who question nothing.
No-one within the school system will admit that, of course - but it's quite obvious to those of us who managed to escape it and become thinking individuals.

#2 - Sometimes, memorization is a good thing, because sometimes, that is the only way to learn things. Your basic math facts...I bet you have those memorized.

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Math deals with absolutes - so it's easy to memorize.
Math also involves nothing of the studen't character - because it is absolute. There are no storylines, etc. As such it is not a very interactive subject.
Many things taught in schools, however, do not deal with absolutes.
If a kid has a natural interest in a given subject, then fine - memorize all you like. But when kids are force-fed things that bore them to tears, it is plain wrong, as it is a waste of their time and energy.
The time and energy would be much better spent teaching them about something in which they have a genuine interest, rather than forcing things that do not interest them down their throats.

But we can't have that - because that's a formula that produces independent, unique, thinking individuals - and that is very much frowned upon in this homogenized, cookie-cutter society of ours.

I've done that, thanks.
Math deals with absolutes - so it's easy to memorize.
Math also involves nothing of the studen't character - because it is absolute. There are no storylines, etc. As such it is not a very interactive subject.

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The teaching of math could be very much improved IMO, though. Let's give a brief example. If I kept subtracting 7 from 1000, would it come out evenly, or would something be left over? How much would be left over? We could go, "1000, 993, 986...", but this would be very tedious. Instead, we know we could subtract 700, leaving 300. We could then take away 280, leaving 20. Finally, from 20 take away 14 and 6 is left over. That didn't take long, the remainder is 6. We can also figure the quotient easily, 700, 280, 14 means 100 + 40 + 2, or 142. The base ten system allows a time consuming question to be handled easily!
But you won't be allowed to teach it this way. A school will insist that you teach the algorithm we all learned for division, and students will use it without understanding why it works. They won't see that this incredibly reduces the time to make the calculation. It will be boring, and even most math teachers will think that math should be boring. They probably don't know why the algorithm works themselves.

Also, understanding how the process works requires an IQ of perhaps 105-110. Schools teach everyone, and teach them all the same way. A boring algorithm can be memorized by somone with an IQ of 85, so it is the preferred method. Not everyone should go to school. Some people should work instead.

Many things taught in schools, however, do not deal with absolutes.
If a kid has a natural interest in a given subject, then fine - memorize all you like. But when kids are force-fed things that bore them to tears, it is plain wrong, as it is a waste of their time and energy.
The time and energy would be much better spent teaching them about something in which they have a genuine interest, rather than forcing things that do not interest them down their throats.
But we can't have that - because that's a formula that produces independent, unique, thinking individuals - and that is very much frowned upon in this homogenized, cookie-cutter society of ours.

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Our declaration of independance says, "All men are created equal". What does this mean? Why do they say it is "self evident"? I believe this error is one reason why our schools enforce so much conformity. We have to accept that we are not all equal.